Navigation areas are extremely pervasive and popular UI structures today. They are usually presented in a major left-side area of a window, and as a pure hierarchy of selectable nodes. They typically have multiple roots as the highest-level folders, and branches for each root, down to “end leaves” or “end nodes”. Clicking an end node in a navigation tree typically navigates a user or launches for him a related panel or view.
Most administrative UIs today pair a left-side navigation or launch tree area with a larger area. However, more and more UIs are starting to introduce topology UIs in the content area (e.g., VMWare® and IBM® Systems Director 6.1) which can be useful to show non-hierarchical meshes, relationships, and flows.
For the navigation trees, today, they do not handle non-hierarchies very well. Yet, there is an ever-increasing and growing “meshing” and interconnections today between things. A pure hierarchal constraint places an unnatural and unnecessary limitation on navigation trees.
Most admin users prefer to stay in and use simpler tabular UIs, if they do not need the added meshing available in a content-side topology view, and they often do not need the topology view. So, surfacing indicators and controls for the meshed information in the navigation frame could benefit users by preemptively giving them control at a higher level.